


let me be the ground underneath your feet

by annakaashi



Series: self-indulgent haikyuu fics [6]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Cooking, Fluff, Gen, Growing Up, Kid!Kuroo, Minor Kuroo Tetsurou/Oikawa Tooru, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, slight angst, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 07:53:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16154801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/annakaashi/pseuds/annakaashi
Summary: Tetsurou is 8 years old when he falls in love with cooking. It becomes his safe place, where he can be himself.His grandma was the one to teach him how to cook, and Tetsurou thought of it as a thing that connected the two of them.Or: a fic focusing on Kuroo’s relationship with his grandmother and cooking.





	let me be the ground underneath your feet

Tetsurou stirs the pot on the stove, his thoughts far away as his hands make the moves rhythmically, as they’ve done a thousand times before. The easy and automatic movements make him relax, and the murmur of the people, the clinking of the cutlery and the sizzling pans on the stove, are just a buzz in his ears.

He takes a deep breath and looks around his little restaurant. It’s not much, it’s not big by any means, but it’s his. The high schoolers coming in after clubs usually sit in the corners, chatting and laughing, the tired university students just sit at the bar, trying to stay awake as they eat. Salary men coming from their workplace, weary after a long day, just sit down where they can, enjoying a bowl of food silently. The atmosphere is light, and filled with contentment.

Tetsurou looks around, and his heart fills with joy and happiness. The look on each of his customer’s face is worth the neverending workload. He wanted to make people happy with his cooking ever since he was a child, and to actually see it coming true is something that Tetsurou can’t describe with words.

He looks at the portrait hanging behind the counter. _Grandma, I hope you’re proud of me._

 

***

 

Tetsurou is 8 years old when he falls in love with cooking. It happens quickly, it’s one moment in his life, but it has such an impact he’s sure it will never, ever leave him.

It’s a Sunday morning, and he sees his Grandma tying an apron around her waist. When she spots him, she smiles at him, warmth reaching her eyes. The wrinkles around her eyes crinkle with it, and Tetsurou finds himself smiling back. He always loved his Grandma. She was soft where his Grandfather wasn’t, and chatty and outgoing where Tetsurou himself wasn’t.

“Come on, Tetsu, do you want to help me cook?”

Tetsurou nods, and pads into the kitchen. His Grandma brings in a little stool, so he can reach the counter.

“So, what are we making, Grandma?”

She smiles down at him. “We’re making curry, Tetsu. Could you wash the vegetables, please?”

He nods, and hops down the stool with the vegetables tucked close to his body. He goes to the sink and dumps them into it. He goes back for his stool, grabs it, and sets it down in front of the sink because _he’s still not tall enough to reach it._

After washing the vegetables, he brings them back to the counter where his grandma is working on the meat.

“Grandma, I’m done! What can I do now?” he asks, looking up at her with wide, curious eyes.

His grandma sets the knife she’d been working with, and looks at his work. “You did a really good job washing them, Tetsu!” she says, ruffling his already unruly hair.

She gets a vegetable peeler out of a drawer, and hands it to him. “Can I trust you to peel the carrots and the potatoes?”

Tetsurou takes it out of her hand, and nods with a big smile. He brings his stool back, and starts working on the vegetables. The work he does is by no means flawless and perfect like his grandmother’s is, but it’s his work and he’s proud.

His grandmother hands him a small knife then. “Sweetie, can you cut up the carrots while I prepare the meat?”

“Yes! They’re gonna be the best carrots ever!”

So he starts cutting them up. Some of the slices become too thin, and some of them are so huge that later, when he’s done, his Grandma helps him cut it into smaller ones. She takes his smaller hands into hers, and guides them expertly, showing him the proper way to do it. He focuses on the movements, his eyes never leaving her hands on his. He lets her steer him, the rhythm of the motion ingraining in his body.

When they’re done with preparations, they move to the stove, Tetsurou watching the way his grandmother navigates the kitchen.

It’s like watching an artist paint. She has a lot of different colors, black, blue, white, red, anything you could imagine. As she dips the brush into a color and starts painting with it, then a new one and another one, the colors slowly become a beautiful picture. The colors blend into each other, making up new hues of the palette.

The swirls of the brushstrokes and the picture amazes Tetsurou. He wants to be like his grandma one day. He wants to make such amazing pictures like that.

When the curry’s done, his grandmother turns to him. “Dear, please fetch your father and grandfather, I’ll set the table in the meanwhile. You did a really great job, Tetsurou.” She says, a soft smile playing on her lips as she ruffles his hair.

He beams back at her, his smile radiant and bright like the summer sun, and he runs off to find his grandfather and father.

 

When they’re all seated around the table, they mutter a quick _itadakimasu_ , and dig in. They don’t talk much around the table while eating, they never do. Halfway through the meal, however, Tetsurou’s grandfather speaks up.

“This curry is really delicious.”

Tetsurou puts down his utensils, and straightens up. “I helped Grandma make it!” He announces with a proud smile plastered on his face.

His father and grandpa smile at him. “So that’s why this is so delicious!” His father says.

He nods, and that’s when he realizes he wants to make people happy with his cooking. He wants to make them feel content and at home.

 

***

 

Over the years, Tetsurou learns a lot from his Grandma. The tasks he does start from peeling and washing and cutting vegetables, then slowly turn into seasoning meat and frying and actual cooking. By the time he’s 15, he’s the one cooking meals on the weekends, and when he has the time between volleyball practice and studying, he makes his own bento for the next day.

When he cooks, his Grandmother is sitting on a chair in the kitchen next to the counter, chatting with Tetsurou and occasionally giving him some tips on the meal he’s making. Tetsurou loves these mornings spent with her.

He knows he can tell her everything, and he does so. He tells her about his insecurities, whether he really fits in with his new team at Nekoma while making _katsudon_. He tells her about the insufferable libero that’s in his year and how he always, _always_ has to counter everything Tetsurou says, but it’s nice to have someone with the same goals regarding volleyball when he’s pounding the dough for _anpan_. He tells her about how the senpai are looking down on Kenma because he doesn’t put a lot of effort into training and that ‘ _Grandma it just makes me so angry because it’s so obvious that Kenma cares a lot about volleyball, otherwise he wouldn’t do it’_ and she replies with a soft ‘ _not everyone bothers to look below the surface, Tetsu’._ (What she doesn’t say is that Kenma is doing it because of Tetsurou.)

Cooking becomes a thing that the two of them share. It becomes a place for Tetsurou to let all of his feelings out. All of his problems, insecurities, happiness and sadness.

When they lose at a tournament for the first time, he comes home, and makes grilled mackerel. The regret and the frustration melt out of him as he cooks and talks to his Grandmother, words spilling out of him. When he’s done with the food, he’s a crying mess in her arms.

On Kenma’s birthday, the smell of a baking apple pie wafts through the house as Tetsurou pokes out his tongue in concentration, writing ‘Happy birthday!’ on the pie. He’s excited, but a little nervous as well. He’s never made apple pie before, and he wants it to be good, he wants Kenma to like it. When he takes it over to surprise him, Kenma hugs him unexpectedly, and later that day, Kenma says that it was the best apple pie he had with the biggest smile Tetsurou has ever seen from him.

 

When graduation and choosing what Tetsurou wants to do later in life arrives, he already knows he wants to open his own little restaurant one day. So he takes up a business course at university, and he takes cooking lessons on the side so he’d have a certificate of his cooking skills as well. It’s exhausting, he barely has time to sleep, and he had to give up playing volleyball competitively. He can still play with a local team that has two practices in the evening and one or two practice match on the weekends.

It doesn’t matter that he can’t play competitively anymore, he’s doing well in school and in his cooking lessons as well, and that’s what matters the most. 

He meets a guy in his second year. His name is Matsukawa Issei, and they hit it off immediately. They even try to date for a few weeks, but then they realize it’s not working out. They decide to break it off, but stay as friends. After breaking up, he once takes Issei home, and introduces Issei to his grandma. She loves him to pieces, and team up against Tetsurou after Tetsurou graces them with his cooking. Traitors.

It’s actually through Mattsun he gets to know Tooru. They tease each other endlessly, and sometimes the words they throw at each other hurt. After all, you can hurt those you love the most. They hurt so much that Tetsurou goes back home to his childhood house and locks himself into the kitchen, and cooks and cooks and cooks. He cooks his feelings away, and with a clearer head and several pots of food, both he and Tooru talk it out.

They move into a small apartment once both of them graduate and have a steady job. Tetsurou starts with being a chef in a small, family-run restaurant, while Tooru teaches at a nearby junior high. It’s stressful for both of them, but they manage.

On a sunny day in May, Tetsurou gets a call from his Dad. He doesn’t think anything of it, he’s taking the clothes out of the machine.

“Hey Dad, what’s up?” he asks, phone lodged between his ear and shoulder as he hefts the basket of clothes up.

“Tetsurou…” his Dad’s voice is hoarse, and Tetsurou’s stomach twists into knots.

“Dad, what’s wrong?”

He can hear his father take a deep breath, even through the phone. “It’s your grandmother. She passed away this morning.”

The news shock Tetsurou so much he drops the basket, clothes scattered all around it. He can’t speak, and he can faintly hear his father call his name.

“I’ll… call you back,” he says, and lowers the phone slowly.

He disconnects the call, and just stares at the white wall. His grandmother is gone.

 

Two years later, he stands in his new kitchen, and  waits for his first customer. Soon enough, a curious group of high schoolers wander in, and look at the menu. They all order a tempura soba, and Tetsurou starts cooking. While he’s cooking, the kids ask him about his restaurant and he answers them readily.

He gets to know them a little too. When he serves them the food, they all smile at him with big, grateful smiles, and dig in. The content look on their faces tells him everything. This is what he wanted to do in the first place, and his heart is soaring that he can actually bring smiles to people’s faces with his cooking.

He smiles back at them, and the scene feels familiar. It reminds him of the old days when he wasn’t cooking yet, and his grandma served him with a smile and a ruffle of his hair.

He knows his grandma has been gone for two years now, but when he’s cooking he feels like she’s still there with him, sitting on a chair next to the counter, chatting with him about everything and nothing. He knows that she’s watching over him, just like she did for all those years.

 

***

 

Tetsurou gets thrown back into the real world by the buzzing of his phone. It’s a text from Tooru, saying that he’ll come by once he finishes up volleyball training with the kids. Tetsurou smiles at the text, knowing that Tooru will be here in 30 minutes, a pile of unmarked tests next to him, chatting with Tetsurou as they both work.

It’s not a quiet evening in with his partner, it’s not tranquil and silent. It’s buzzing with life and noisy, but it still feels like home to both of them. Tetsurou created a home here, and not just for the two of them, but for their customers, who’ve become friends, as well.

 

 

_People know when your heart is in the food, Tetsurou. It’s in the very soul of it, and because you made it with love, they will love it as well. That’s the most important thing when you cook for others. You only get as much love as you give. You have a big heart, Tetsu, and you have even more love to give. If you can convey it in your food, you’ll get that love back tenfold._

**Author's Note:**

> Hey there, thanks for reading this!!  
> I was inspired to do this after chapter 318 came out and I always liked the idea of Kuroo knowing how to cook and being really good at it, so this fic came to life!  
> A big, big thanks to Ness for betaing this, honestly, bless you for putting up with my Kuroo-loving dumbass self❤️  
> Anyways, you can reach me on Twitter or tumblr at the same username!^^
> 
> Ps. Kudos and comments are very much appreciated!❤️


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